Author: Eric Kansa

Endangered Data Week highlights the urgent need to protect public records. Our ongoing collaboration with the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) project provides a specific example of why public records matter. Before we discuss DINAA in detail, first we need to provide some context. The United States has enacted a variety of laws […]

This week is “Love Your Data Week“. The event organizers hope it will raise awareness for the need to better curate research data in order to encourage more collaboration, transparency, and reproducibility. However in the US, “Love your data week” comes during a major political crisis that threatens all of our data. Already, the Trump […]

The Alexandria Archive Institute, the nonprofit organization behind Open Context, is very pleased to announce that Dr. Federico Buccellati will join us in 2017 as a Research Fellow, thanks to the generous support of his project by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Federico is the principal investigator […]

Thanks to recent grants, we have started on the next phase of development for the IMLS and NSF funded Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) project. DINAA aims to aggregate datasets curated by US state government offices to build an open gazetteer of North American archaeological and historical sites. As we prepare additional state […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Archaeology program awarded funds to expand the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), under the direction of David G. Anderson (University of Tennessee, Knoxville; NSF #1623621) and Joshua Wells (Indiana University South Bend; NSF #1623644). This new funding builds upon prior NSF support in 2012 and complements another 2016 […]

Increasingly, archaeology data are being made available openly on the web. But what do these data show? How can we interrogate them? How can we visualize them? How can we re-use data visualizations? We’d like to know. This is why we have created the Open Context and Carleton University Prize for Archaeological Visualization and we […]

Last summer, we launched a major programming effort to upgrade Open Context. The upgrade involves completely rewriting all of Open Context’s software so as to more efficiently scale Open Context and take advantage of technology standards that have emerged to prominence since our last major upgrade back in 2009-2011. We’ve now deployed the new version […]

With summer wrapping up and a new fellowship about to begin, it’s time to share some updates about Open Context. Warning! Much of this post is pretty geeky. So if you don’t enjoy geeking out on the nitty-gritty of archaeological informatics issue, you’re welcome to move on to something else! I’m busy working with John […]

We are happy to report the publication of a paper synthesizing several integrated datasets documenting zooarchaeological specimens from Neolithic Anatolia. The open access journal PLOS ONE published the paper on Friday. The paper presents results of a large-scale data sharing and integration study funded by a “Computable Data Challenge” award from the Encyclopedia of Life […]

We recently concluded a workshop for the DINAA project, held at the University of Tennessee (UT), Knoxville Office of Research on March 19th and 20th. The workshop brought together more than 30 participants, including managers and researchers from universities and state and federal agencies across Eastern North America, as well as graduate students from UT […]